Report: School admin costs rise $2 billion

Published 4:16 am, Saturday, May 20, 2017

In little more than 20 years, Illinois added more than 33,000 new public school administrators at an estimated annual cost of nearly $2 billion.

A new report by the non-profit EdChoice shows that Illinois’ public schools have grown their student bodies by only 11 percent from to 2015. But in that same time, the state’s public school administrator count has increased by almost 50 percent.

That’s 33,000 more taxpayer-funded position in 23 years.

The report’s author, Ben Scafidi, is a professor of economics and director of the Education Economics Center at Kennesaw State University. He said those massive sums of money could have been used to lower taxes, pay down pension debt or even on more competitive teacher salaries.

“When you’re spending all of that money on staffing, that money can’t be used for other purposes,” he said. “As they keep adding bureaucracy, that’s money that can’t be used to compensate teachers well. I don’t think that’s what taxpayers want.”

Defenders of the massive spending on non-teachers say it helps the disadvantaged student population, but test scores and graduation rates haven’t improved and in some cases declined, Scafidi said.

Illinois has underfunded pension liabilities of $130 billion, and each new administrator adds to that.

“It’s a double whammy,” Scafidi said. “Money you’re using for the staffing surge is money that the state of Illinois and school districts in Illinois can’t use to plug their massive pension hole.”

From 1992 to 2014, spending per student rose by 56 percent, but inflation-adjusted teacher salaries dropped by three percent in that time. Scafidi says the surge in administrative workers explains that difference. Nationally, the explosion of non-teaching staff at public schools has been so expensive that the added cost of paying them would equal an $11,000 raise for every public school teacher in the country, the report states.

A spokeswoman from the Illinois State Board of Education didn’t offer any insight on the study, instead replying by email that “Personnel decisions for schools and school districts are made at the local level.”

The Illinois Education Association, an interest group that represents teachers and more than 29,000 non-teaching school employees, refused to comment on the story. Communications director Charlie McBarron said in an email that “IEA is not inclined to comment on ‘studies’ released by groups with an obvious bias against public education and the people who work in public schools. We don’t consider such data trustworthy.”

The data used in the report is publicly available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and National Center for Education Statistics.